Abstract: The metabolic profiles were obtained by high performance liquid chromatography combined with a LTQ Orbitrap XL mass spectrometer (HPLC-LTQ Orbitrap XL MS) platform to analyze serum specimens from the people of healthy control group and patients of hepatitis B virus (HBV)-induced cirrhosis. Then the data were analyzed with the pattern recognition methods and nonparametric test. The orthogonal partial least squares-discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) mode (R2（Y）=90.1%, Q2=66.7%) was constructed by the serum metabolic profiles of Child-Pugh grades A, B, C groups and a healthy control group in the training set and the good discrimination ability of this mode for the testing set was demonstrated with the accuracy of 93.8%. The corresponding specific metabolic biomarkers used to distinguish different cirrhosis grades were discovered, such as lysophosphatidylcholine (LPC), glycolchenodeoxycholic acid (GCDCA), cysteine, glycine, aminoadipic acid, pipecolic acid. The results suggest that the metabolic profiling of serum can be used to construct the discrimination mode and discover the metabolic biomarkers for the HBV-induced cirrhosis, which will support the diagnosis and evaluation of the HBV-induced cirrhosis.

Key words: hepatitis B virus (HBV)-induced cirrhosis, metabolic profile, orthogonal partial least squares-discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA), serum, liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS), metabolomics